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Administration

By its nature, Administration in an OAIS is a function that touches every aspect of digital preservation. Technical support and infrastructure also fuel this function.

This function is where the fundamental rules and policies that define the system operations are expressed and applied. This is one of three functions, with Preservation Planning and Archival Storage, where organizational concerns take the lead. The rules for Ingest, the current strategies for Preservation Planning, and the maintenance cycles for Archival Storage should all be known and coordinated by Administration.

$$$$ This is where the organizational infrastructure meets the technological infrastructure. Organizational resources need to be allocated to automatically (and appropriately) apply relevant policies and/or develop a stringent workflow that provides a manual or semi-automated and well-documented process. This requires policy development and programming skills as well as software and tools.

0101 The functions grouped under Common Services, Data Management, Archival Storage, Access, and Ingest implement the plans created and overseen by the Administration functions. These functions include all the workings of the technical infrastructure—from the bitstream to the system—maintaining, changing, securing the software and the hardware, and documenting every step. These functions require desktop computing services for staff and any technical support involved in customer service.

Exercise

Can you think of examples where your institution automatically applies policies (e.g., quality control for digital projects, evaluating file formats at transfer, retrieving metadata received from procedures)?